I just ordered a dell mini w/ 8 gb ssd, 512 mb ram, and xp home. How many gb's does this setup fill when I first boot up the laptop? How much hd space can i recover by deleting unneeded programs vs by doing a clean install w/ nlite?

I just ordered a dell mini w/ 8 gb ssd, 512 mb ram, and xp home. How many gb's does this setup fill when I first boot up the laptop? How much hd space can i recover by deleting unneeded programs vs by doing a clean install w/ nlite?

Do a favor yourself and try a clean install, you will appraise the improvements in speed, stability and free space available.

My Dell Mini 9 8gb is on its way so I have been reading through the forum. Just wanted to touch base on this topic. If you do a little work with nLite you can get a WinXP Home install down to just under 800mb. I have done this on my wife's eee701 2g surf which has only 2gb of SSD space and 512mb ram.

On her eee after nLite XP Home, OpenOffice, FoxIt, Pidgin, EphPod, AVG, VLC, and some other minor apps, she is using ~1.2gb of space. Gotta remember to turn off the page file, which even with only 512mb of ram XP runs great. With this she sees ~31 second bootup from button press to wireless connected and all processes settled.

Kinda sad, going by the system requirements, Installing MS Office 2003 is actually lighter than OpenOffice 3. I'll probably go with this on my Mini when it arrives and try to slim it down further.

There's still some other things to install, but mostly done. Currently have 6.19gb free on the 8gb SSD (7.14gb usable). No page file, no hibernation and the thing works fine off 512mb Ram. Can't wait till my 2gb stick arrives.

I've spent the past few days tinkering with various options in nLite. I was able to get the Win XP Home install (using the CD supplied from Dell as a starting point to create the custom ISO) down to about 650MB of space used. The ISO itself was just 201MB.

I'm still experimenting, but the only problem I had was getting the Webcam to work (the driver would throw an error during installation). I just talked to another engineer about this and I think I know what it is...

I had unchecked Windows Image Acquisition during the nLite process and I recall for a fact that webcams and scanners need that. Will try it again with WIA included. If it works, then I can say that I've got XP down to under 700MB of space used. My goal is to have Win XP Home SP-3, all the latest Windows Updates, IE7, FireFox, and AVG Free or Norton Internet Security 2009 all taking up 1GB of space or less.

Stay tuned.

I should add that right out of the box, I only had about 700MB free on the 8GB SSD!